If you offer any kind of service to customers, running workshops are a great way of marketing yourself and your business. They inform and advise and can act as a great way of speaking directly to your target customer audience. Also, as will become apparent here, they are not a one-off event in terms of marketing, they actually offer a lot more.

At Appletree we recently held a ½ day marketing workshop for small, service-based companies. As well as it being a great opportunity to give marketing advice and tips to the businesses, it was also a great way to use a number of different marketing activities, at little or no cost.

On the surface, it was an activity that happened during a few hours, with a captive audience who listened and participated in a lively workshop. Dig deeper however, and it becomes clear how many marketing activities were involved in the workshop, before, during and after the event.

Let me take you back a few weeks. Once the venue and timings of the workshop had been confirmed, an online booking system was created. An email promoting the event was then sent out to a database of small businesses. This database was known to be ‘clean’ and up to date, an absolute must when dealing with contact databases. Details of the event were added to our website. This is great for SEO, which looks for regular updates on sites in order to rank them. We then sent details of the event to another mailing list, via our monthly newsletter, which is linked to our website. Again, this encouragement to visit our website is a great way to share more of our services to those contacts, and to improve SEO.

A reminder email was sent to all contacts a week before the event, and some follow up telephone calls made to outline the benefits of attending the workshop.

The desired number of delegates was reached before the day, and an email was sent to each asking if they had any specific objectives they were hoping to meet as a result of the workshop. This was the start of relationship building with our key audience.

During the day we met some really interesting people, all of whom were small business owners and all wanting to learn how to use marketing successfully to help grow their businesses. Feedback from the day was asked from each delegate, along with a personal thank you to each for attending. It’s this long-term relationship building that creates the most long-lasting business opportunities.

All in all, around 6 different channels of marketing were used, just for a workshop that lasted a few hours. It led to lots of ticks on our marketing activity plan!

So if you’re considering running a workshop but don’t think you have the time, consider it as a huge opportunity to cost effectively market yourself and your business.

How do you remember what you’re going to say? If you’re giving a talk or a presentation, how do you remember what to say? Can you memorise a couple of hours worth of material, or do you have a clever way of reminding yourself what you need to cover?

I usually start by writing out what I want to say, in long hand – or the typed version. Then I go through it and highlight the key words or phrases that will remind me what I’ll be talking about as I go through the session. They get marked with a highlighter pen or put in bold. After that I usually create a postcard for each section of the talk, with the keywords written on them. I take the cards with me and put them somewhere that I can see them, where they won’t distract my audience. I’ve been using this technique for many years, since I learnt it at Toastmasters (a great place to start to learn about public speaking, by the way.) Most of the time the postcards work quite well, but I have to make sure I don’t put so much onto each one, or the writing gets too small. Which means that I can’t always get enough onto the card to remind me of everything I want to cover.

And then I learnt a great new technique! It was at the monthly session of a peer to peer group I belong to, called MD2MD. Our speaker, David Hyner, taught us this great new way of remembering stuff. He read out a list of about 20 words and on their own, none of us could remember beyond the first three or four. Then he had us attach an emotion to each word – joy, fear or love. When he read out the list again, I started to see the words as pictures – things I knew or had seen somewhere else recently; things that made me laugh or smile at. Being a visual person anyway, this really brought the list of words to life and all of a sudden I could remember them, like a story. When we were asked if anyone would like to have a go at remembering the whole list, I volunteered. I scored 20 out of 20 and won a bar of chocolate for my efforts!

To prove that this wasn’t a fluke, I decided to try out the technique when I got home. I was due to give a 30 minute presentation the next morning at a networking event. I got out my coloured pens and a sheet of card. I looked through the presentation that I’d already typed out and turned the highlighted words into colourful images. Now, each section of my talk was represented by a picture!

The following morning I took my pictures to the networking event and had them on the table next to the flip chart. Each time I needed to know what came next, I just looked at the pictures and knew exactly what to say! Rather than seeing a list of words, I saw an image that represented paragraphs of a whole page of text. It was one of the most enjoyable presentations I’ve given for a while!

In this blog is a picture of the images I drew for the presentation. It won’t mean much to you, but I thought you might like to see what you can do!

Used properly, PowerPoint can be a really effective way of enhancing presentations. Used badly, it can do harm to your reputation. I’d like to share some tips I received on a birthday card, for an alternative way to use PowerPoint.

Do you use events to promote your business? You probably go to networking meetings, to connect with new prospects, but have you thought where else you can go, or what else you can do?

Attending workshops. If you’re attending a workshop as a delegate, you can also use it as a networking opportunity. There will be other business people there and some of them could be potential clients or suppliers. I’ve been to business workshops on a weekday, where people have turned up looking like they’re just going to the shops on a Saturday morning. Not quite the impression you want to give other people, so make sure you make an effort.

Running workshops. Do you run workshops to demonstrate your skills and experience? If you provide a service, delivering a workshop is a great way to show people what you do and how good you are. Use the time to give away advice, rather than spending time telling people what you do, and you will build up rapport with your audience. Once they trust you they are more likely to buy from you.

Conferences. Attending a conference is a great way to learn from the speakers. It’s also a great networking opportunity. Some conferences arrange networking sessions in between speeches, so make the most of. Take plenty of business cards and dress like you mean it. If you can, speak to the speakers too, because you never know who they know.

Open days. Moving offices? Launching a new product? Celebrating a success? Through a party or open day and invite everyone you know. Last summer we celebrated our 10th birthday at Appletree with a party. We put a marquee onto the lawn outside the office, wheeled in a hog roast and poured a few glasses of wine. We invited all our clients, past and present, along with lots of our suppliers. It was a great networking event for us and for everyone else who came – lots of business cards changed hands!

Think about what events you can go to or run yourself, to help you promote your business beyond the reaches of networking.

In the last couple of weeks I’ve heard two different marketing presentations that give very different advice and I wanted to share them with you and let you decide which is right.

More is less

At the first presentation, we were shown the idea of a wheel with a number of spokes. The presenter said that the more marketing activities you have – the spokes on the wheel – the safer you are. If one of the spokes breaks – or if one of your marketing activities fails, you can fall back on the others. For example, one of your spokes might be a direct mail campaign. If it doesn’t achieve the results you wanted, it’s not the end of the world, because you’ve still got your monthly email newsletter being published, your Twitter account building up your reputation and your talks at networking events helping you sell your products and services. It was suggested that you can have as many as 10 spokes on your wheel. I currently have at least 10 – a website, a blog, Twitter, an email newsletter, networking, presentations, LinkedIn, Facebook, referrals and webinars coming soon.

Less is more

At the next presentation, we were asked to write down the top five marketing activities that bring us work, in order of effectiveness. I wrote networking, presentations, referrals, LinkedIn and email newsletter. The top three bring in considerably more business for me than the others. It was then suggested to us that we stop doing the fourth and fifth items on the list – completely. The presenter said there was no point in spending any more time or effort on activities that don’t bring in the most new business. He was actually advising me to stop sending the email newsletter I’ve been writing for 8 years and to get off LinkedIn! Later at that meeting I took on a new client. If it hadn’t been for my newsletter, I wouldn’t have been invited to the meeting in the first place.

So which way is the right way? Do you use numerous marketing activities to support each other and work as back up; or do you stick to the few activities that bring you the most business? Do you do a little with a lot, or focus your time and effort on what really works?

Can you sell your products and services from the stage? I’m not talking about the theatrical stage or suggesting that you become an actor. This is about selling what you do from giving presentations.

For many years I’ve given presentations at networking groups. At the end, people tell me how much they enjoyed my talk, or how useful they found it. Many people subscribe to my newsletter as a result and sometimes people ask me for a meeting, so that we can talk more about their marketing. But I’ve never really ‘sold’ anything and waiting for people to ask for a meeting can be a bit hit and miss.

All that is about to change! I recently went to a workshop that teaches you to actually sell what you do from the stage, by talking about it. This sort of selling is not the pushy “buy it now before they all run out” sort of selling. It’s not selling where ‘selling’ is a dirty word. It’s about giving people something they need.

The reason that this sort of selling works is because there are two things that you absolutely have to have, if you’re going to do it properly. They are passion and authenticity. Without either, no one will buy what you have to sell.

So are you passionate about what you do? Do you totally love your job and your business? When you’re doing it, are you ‘in the flow’, where you lose track of time? If you have this passion then you can speak about it and sell it from the stage. I’m passionate about helping coaches, consultants and trainers to grow their businesses. I love working with people who want to make a difference through their work and want to build a successful business. I believe that marketing really works, when it’s done properly; that it doesn’t have to cost the earth. I believe that it’s about creating products and services that people want or need rather than selling them something they don’t want or need.

What about authenticity? Can you speak from the real you and tell the truth? When you’re presenting, are you being genuine or are you just trying to impress people? If you don’t tell the truth or set out to impress others, you won’t speak with authenticity and the audience will see straight through you. I could stand in front of an crowd and tell them how great marketing can be for their business, but only if they pay someone else to do all it for them, because the only way to get marketing done properly is to pay an expert. And then people would start throwing things at me! No one would buy anything I tried to sell, because it would be obvious that I didn’t believe what I was saying. And when you don’t believe what you’re saying, you can’t be passionate about it, either.

If you use speaking to sell what you do, are you passionate and authentic? If you are, then take a look at www.ShiftSpeakerTraining.com for the next steps in turning your presentations into profits.

If you don’t yet use speaking to sell what you do, I encourage you to, because it really works. If you’ve never spoken in public before, look for your local Toastmasters group (www.Toastmasters.org) because it’s a great place to learn the basics. And then go to www.ShiftSpeakerTraining.com to find out how to do it profitably!

Quite a few years ago, when people discovered PowerPoint and how useful it was for creating presentations, there was a trend for throwing as much into a presentation as possible. In went the bullet points that whizzed in from left and right. In went the images that spiralled round until they settled in the right place. And in went the WordArt – a way of emphasising a key word and phrases by giving them colour, stretching them sideways and making them 3D. Funky stuff!

But WordArt actually makes it harder to read the words you want to emphasise because it’s too easy to stretch and distort them. It’s too simple to put them into colours that don’t tie in with the rest of your presentation.

If it’s hard to read on a computer screen, just think how difficult it will be for someone seeing it on a projector screen from the back of the room.

When Microsoft launched Office 2007 they came up with some clever new features that mean we don’t have to rely on the old stuff anymore; and they sensibly relegated WordArt to a tiny button that’s quite hard to find.

So the next time you’re putting together a PowerPoint presentation, leave out the WordArt. If you need highlight key messages, just put them in big, bold letters on a slide all on their own. If you need colour and graphics, think about using your own logo and branding to bring your slides to life.